The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley
Charles H. Townes
Physics, 1964
By Russell Schoch
1984
Charles Hard Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28,
1915. He attended the Greenville public schools and then Furman University
where he completed the B.S. degree in physics and the B.A. in modern
languages, graduating summa cum laude in 1935, at the age of 19. Because of
its "beautiful logical structure," physics had fascinated him since
his first course in the subject during his sophomore year in college.
Townes completed work for the M.A. in physics at Duke University in 1936
and earned the Ph.D. in 1939 from the California Institute of Technology. A
member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1939 to
1947, Townes worked extensively during World War II designing radar systems.
From this he turned to applying the microwave technique of wartime research to
spectroscopy.
At Columbia University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1948,
Townes continued his research in microwave physics. In 1951, he conceived the
idea of the maser; in 1958, Townes and his brother-in-law, Dr. A.L. Schawlow,
conceived the idea of the laser. Lasers and masers are devices that produce a
unique kind of radiation. Lasers produce an intense beam of a very pure single
color; masers produce similar radiation, but in the microwave part of the
electromagnetic spectrum. The names are acronyms derived from Microwave
Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (MASER) and Light
Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER). Although the maser
was conceived first, the laser has proven more useful.
Lasers, in fact, have been called a fulfillment of one of mankind's oldest
technological dreams, that of providing a light beam intense enough to
vaporize the hardest and most heat-resistant materials. Townes has called the
laser "a marriage of optics and electronics," explaining that the
laser gives an intensity of light which is as much as a billion times the
intensity of light on the surface of the sun. To achieve that intensity, the
laser beam must be localized in a very small area; within that area, it will
go through any material very quickly. Lasers have been used, among other
things, to drill holes in diamonds, to weld the retina of the eye to its
supports to prevent detachment, and to perform microsurgery on parts of single
cells.
From 1959 to 1961, Townes was on a leave of absence from Columbia to serve
as vice president and director of research for the Institute of Defense
Analysis in Washington, D.C. In 1961, he was appointed provost and professor
of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1964, the Nobel
Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Townes and a pair of Russian physicist
who had independently conceived the idea of the maser shortly after Townes
began his initial work in the 1950s.
In 1967, Townes was appointed Professor-at-Large at the University of
California, participating in research, and other activities on several
campuses of the University, with his headquarters in Berkeley. He is currently
University Professor at the Berkeley campus.
----------
Schoch, Russell. "Charles H. Townes:
Physics, 1964." The Nobel Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 24.
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